There is a fascinating article at Bloomberg today about the influence of industry, government, and academia on bacon consumption by Americans. As you may be aware if you're, well, alive, we are in the midst of Bacon Mania. Just about any product that contains bacon in its name will fly off the shelf and into American tummies. How did this happen?
In the past decade, bacon has grown into an industry generating more than $4 billion in annual sales. It has moved from a breakfast meat to a food trend touching an incredible array of consumer goods, both edible and not, from bacon-heavy fast-food burgers and bacon-infused desserts at fine dining restaurants to bottles of bacon-distilled vodka and even a sexual lubricant formulated to smell (and taste) like bacon. (The Bacon Boom Was Not an Accident)
Follow me below the bacon-fortified orange ham hock for more as I distill the article into edible portions and supplement it with some background information.
The Marketing Campaign
In marketing circles, the promotion of pork is viewed as nothing short of miraculous. It provdes textbook examples of using advertising, the government, and science to gain public acceptance of a product. While the Bloomberg article primarily focuses on bacon, most of us are aware of the other pork marketing efforts, including Pork® The Other White Meat®.
Bacon mania was sparked not in the kitchens of fancy restaurants in New York or Chicago, but in the pork industry’s humble marketing offices in Iowa, where people like Joe Leathers engineered a turnaround for an underappreciated cut of pig. (ibid.)
The article uses Joe "Bacon Belly" Leathers, a man with a nearly lifelong career in the pork industry, to humanize the story. Joe, working alongside the
National Pork Board and others, helped the pork industry's makeover of the pig into what Bloomberg pithily calls "a sort of four-legged chicken".
Government Involvement
During the late 1980s, sales of white pork meat boomed thanks to the marketing campaign while, unfortunately, other cuts slumped. The price of pork bellies fell so low that former President George H. W. Bush became personally involved and the U.S. government engineered a market support plan that included:
... the Bush Administration's pledge of food aid to Poland - a package that was to include up to 20 million pounds of pork bellies, the part of the hog from which bacon is made.
Yugoslavia's purchase of 150,000 pounds of bellies in late October helped the rally along, as did indications that the Soviet Union was interested in buying pork bellies from the United States. (NY Times -- Pork Bellies Continue Fall; Exports Disappoint Traders)
To the dismay of pork proponents everywhere, pork belly prices continued to slide, falling from about 59 cents per pound in 1989 at the onset of the first "Bush Pig Push", to just 42 cents by the end of 1991. Naturally, this forced the nation into full-scale war on dwindling profits, thus "Bush Pig Push Redux".
Hog and pork belly futures rose yesterday on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange after the National Pork Producers Council said the Soviet Union was seeking 30,000 metric tons of American pork.
The Soviets want the pork included in a food-aid package of loan guarantees and direct donations that the Bush Administration is putting together, Mr. Hardin said. (Hogs and Pork Bellies Up On Possible Sales to Soviets)
Once again demonstrating the truth of Adam Smith's
Invisible Hand metaphor about self-regulating behavior of the free marketplace, wherein rugged individuals make and maximize profit without the need for government intervention.
Science & Academia
Naturally, our friends at the Pork Marketing Board fund peer-reviewed scientific studies demonstrating the health and other benefits of pork. Recent research includes this meta-study review of previous studies on diabetes (PDF format, August 2013): Systematic Reviews of Observational and Experimental Human Studies Related to Pork Intake and Type 2 Diabetes, Insulin-Resistance Syndrome or Its Components.
In addition, the Board funds research conducted by a variety of groups, including United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (EdG note: I did not know until writing this diary that ARS studies are funded by industry marketing groups.) and various universities, including those on this funding list from the Pork Marketing Board's website: PMB -- 2014 FUNDING THROUGH GENERAL CALL. As you might expect, the list includes many mid-western universities with agricultural programs.
Conclusion
I highly recommend reading the article. While I've provided a bit of supplemental information in this diary, the article itself provides a detailed look at how marketing influences what we eat and why we eat it. I'll close with this bit near the end of the Bloomberg article:
Despite frequent cries that we have reached peak bacon, the trend now looks like a permanent shift in dining habits. Sales in the U.S. are still growing about 10 percent a year, according to Marketresearch.com, a grocery industry website.